Tuesday 2 February 2010

South Australia starts with internet laws

It appears that the South Australian government would like people commenting on their up and coming election to provide their name and details. Why?

If you are such a government office or official, and you would like my full name and details, please leave your contact details in the comments section, and I will contact you with mine. Anonymous postings will be ignored!

Monday 1 February 2010

The Chaos Confetti strategy failed!

As some of you may know, I've started playing Magic The Gathering. KittyKat has also started playing, although she has commented that this is "a bit of a nerdy game". Saying that, while she was using her sole white coloured Kor Armory based deck, and I used a 3 coloured deck based on Unnatural Schemes, she won all the games. I put this down to mainly being a three coloured deck, I was much slower to get my creatures, artifacts, and other spells out than KittyKat's mono-coloured deck. This was somewhat true, as I was also playing against Jarvo and his modified 3 coloured Unstable Terrain, it was about a 50% win ratio (on a side note, I think if he got to choose again, he would have probably gone for a Rise of the Vampires, as he seems to like the game mechanics associated with those creatures).

As I started playing more and more games, I started to understand some of the mechanics and the way the cards played in combination with each other. I decided to get rid of the third colour out of my deck, and eventually moving away from a dual coloured deck, to a mono-coloured blue deck - based on the Ninjutsu deck. While this deck did prove good, I found that I still lost a few games here and there. I did not understand how I could loose about 50% of them against KittyKat, whereas I found I was loosing about 20% - 30% against Jarvo. Finally, I moved to a pure black deck with the ninjutsu mechanic in it, being the Rats' Nest deck (which has been modified to compete better against Jarvo and KittyKat). It then dawned on me that KittyKat's major strategy at winning was based on playing Chaos Confetti first, throwing the confetti (usually with good accuracy), wiping out the majority of my creatures on the battlefield, and then following up with a Conqueror's Pledge. This would usually mean she would then be able to swarm me with six 1/1 creatures that would be close to unstoppable.

That is where Chaos Confetti comes undone - a bad throw, and no other cards in your hand (thanks to the discard mechanics of the black Rats' Nest deck), meant she hand nothing else to play after she wiped out two of my creatures. Final Score: my 15 to her -23.

Chaos Confetti Strategy
In case any of you are wondering, she does not tear up the actual Chaos Confetti card (just like I do not tear up the Blacker Lotus card when I play it). It is usually a basic land that gets torn up (a spare Island in this case). If you do ever end up playing me, and you do not allow me to tear up a representation of the card, then I'm happy to concede the game - it's just not worth to actually destroy hard to find cards.

My future intentions is to now construct a black / blue ninjutsu deck based on the Ninjutsu and Rats' Nest deck. I will not be doing that for another few more games of playing this sole black deck I currently have. I may add some of the gold bordered cards from Unnatural Schemes to harness the power of multi-coloured decks. Just have to keep on playing and tuning.

And back to the reason before of mentioning why Jarvo would have chosen a different deck if he got the choice - Worldwake has been / is just about to be released. It is the next major block / story line release for the card game. The pre-release was the weekend that just passed, and this coming Friday (5.02.2010) will be the official release. There are already full official card lists on the internet for Worldwake. It looks like the power creature for this arc of the storyline of Magic The Gathering is the vampire as well as a return to the mono-black deck. Good luck if you play!